In this episode, I speak with Joe Brewer — change strategist, complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design. This discussion picks up from our first conversation last year (http://bit.ly/LBWbrewer), recorded right before Joe and his family moved to Costa Rica to engage more fully with cultural design work and planetary collapse management.

We start off this discussion by catching up with what Joe has experienced in the six to eight months since we last spoke on this podcast, which mainly includes a big move with his family to Costa Rica from the United States. I ask him why he and his family chose Costa Rica do work in culture design, and why Costa Rica in particular is primed for regenerative practices and planetary collapse management. I ask Joe to detail his work in designing in-depth courses that lay the groundwork for individuals to build “regenerative hubs” across the planet’s numerous bioregions, and within this scaffolding of knowledge and practice, facilitate the management of planetary collapse on the local and global scale as nation-states, economies, ecologies, and the global climate system continue to break down into the near and distant future. As is a common theme in Joe’s work and in our discussions, I ask Joe about the necessity of doing this work, in spite of the overwhelming likelihood that the human species and countless species of nonhuman life will go extinct as a result of ecological collapse and abrupt climate disruption. Even in the face of planetary collapse on multiple fronts, there are individuals that are doing (seemingly) invisible and sacred work in managing this unprecedented collapse, generating and expanding systems that heal the land, the climate, the human psyche, and humanity’s relationship with the living systems of this planet. As Joe says in this discussion, what can we do that is worthy of our hope? We discuss this and more in this episode.

Joe Brewer has a background in physics, math, philosophy, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. Awakened to the threat of human-induced climate disruption while pursuing a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, he switched fields and began to work with scholars in the behavioral and cognitive sciences with the hope of helping create large-scale behavior change at the level of global civilization.